Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, the Copenhagen Voice, 23 May 2009

The Swedish White Power movement has an increasing number of women members, the magazine Expo reports. Most of them are young and poorly educated; many had children while they were young and have criminal records.

The number of women in the Swedish extreme right wing has risen continuously since the 1980s, and amounted to 20-25% last year, the magazine Expo reports in its latest issue.

Until recently there had been no study that characterised the women who have joined the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden in recent years, but a new book to be published next month looks at 111 women who were members of Nationalsocialistisk front (NSF – National-Socialist Front; it was re-organised in 2008 under the name Folkfronten or Popular Front) between 1997 and 2003.

The study is based on membership lists for the years and the women are characterised on the basis of their life situation when they joined and again in the autumn of 2008. A further seven women were members in the period covered, but did not want to take part in the study.

The women who joined NSF in the period were young – with a median age of 19 – and stayed as members for an average of almost 22 months; seven of them were members for at least five years. By the time the follow-up study was carried out, many of the women studied had left NSF.

When they joined NSF, most of the women lived in southern Sweden in smaller or medium-sized towns, had low or no income and many were still at senior school. At the follow-up study in 2008 their median age had risen to 26. As the youngest was 21, they were no longer at senior school; only 16 had taken a higher education, while 74 had taken vocational training.

Their incomes were still comparatively low and some owed money to the state At least 14 women had been punished for crimes, including weapons offences.

The most important role of women according to Nazi ideology is that of the mother, and 65 of the 111 women had had children by 2008; their median age at the birth of their first child was 22. Almost a third of the women had children with men who are or were active in NSF/Folkfronten.

The study, by Lisa Bjurwald and Maria Blomquist, will be published as a book, ‘God dag kampsyster! (Good day, fighting sister!)’, on 2 June by Atlas.

Expo is published by the Expo Foundation, a privately-owned research foundation founded in 1995 with the aim of studying and mapping anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in society. The foundation is run on a non-profit basis. The Expo platform safeguards democracy and freedom of speech against racist, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and totalitarian tendencies throughout society.

To read the Expo report in Swedish go to: http://www.expo.se/2009/48_2594.html#

To read about ‘God dag kampsyster!’ in Swedish go to: http://www.adlibris.com/se/product.aspx?isbn=9173893471